Cameras are becoming ubiquitous in public and private areas. In public areas, cameras are being used for a variety of different and seemingly unrelated situations. For instance, retail stores use cameras to reduce shoplifting by customers and employees. As another example, many cities have cameras located at particular intersections or on particular highways, thereby providing real-time images of traffic. Additionally, another use for cameras in public places is face identification, which has been used at public events to capture wanted criminals.
Cameras are also becoming more popular in private areas, such as the home. Homemakers are using cameras to ensure that their children are properly cared for or for home security and surveillance purposes. Additionally, cameras are being integrated into home security systems, such that images from within a house can be transmitted to a monitoring facility if a home security system determines that something is amiss and that images should be sent.
The presence of cameras in these areas implicates privacy concerns. For example, in a shoplifting scenario, a criminal might be caught on video. However, other innocent shoppers may also be shown on the same video, and these people just happened to be in the store at the same time as the criminal. In a home situation, an intruder could enter the house when a security system is armed. The intruder, along with residents and guests in the house, could be caught in an image.
In these situations, there are people other than the criminal that are being shown on video. These people may or may not want to have their likeness on these videos.
There are some efforts to maintain privacy. For instance, on the television show “Cops,” passersby and other individuals will have their faces blurred while the criminal and the police will not. This provides a way for bystanders to be blocked from view while the criminal, and any others allowing their likeness to be used, is not. However, this blurring is manually added to images in a video. This is a relatively long and tedious task.
A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus for automatically modifying an image sequence to contain blurred facial images for those selected individuals, such as those people who do not wish to have their identity known.